Signal Designing for Healthy, Affordable, and Sustainable Human-HVAC Interactions for Heating in Smart Homes

Summary

Set against a backdrop in which geopolitical tensions, energy crises and energy-intensive AI infrastructure deepen concerns about demand, affordability and resilience, concerns communities encounter through everyday practices such as winter heating, this doctoral exposé lays out a four-chapter research plan. The first chapter is a multidisciplinary literature review that defines and situates human-HVAC interaction with a focus on smart-home heating. The second comprises longitudinal living-lab studies using design probes to examine everyday heating practices, thermal comfort and indoor environmental quality, paying attention to thermally vulnerable groups such as older adults, pregnant or menopausal women, parents of infants and people sensitive to airborne pollutants. The third uses a VR-based smart-home demonstrator to prototype and evaluate heating and indoor-environment scenarios in a virtual living lab, while also examining the limits of representing bodily indoor climate through VR. The fourth translates these VR-based insights into physical-digital prototypes combining digital fabrication, distributed environmental sensing and varied interface forms, aiming to build a design-oriented understanding of human-HVAC interaction that runs from literature review through living-lab and co-design studies to VR-based prototyping and physical system development.